Chief Kamiakin Elementary: On the Road to

Student Achievement

By Karen Lytle Blaha

Things are on the move at Chief Kamiakin Elementary School in Sunnyside, Washington, and the action is all toward student learning and achievement. It's a demanding journey that requires overcoming roadblocks with data, goals, research, and pulling together.

The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory asked Chief Kamiakin's staff to share their school improvement story during Education Now "in the Future, NWREL's annual conference in Portland. The team called their story "The Rocky Road to School Improvement."

Chief Kamiakin, located in an agricultural community of about 35,000 people, once housed three grades—fourth, fifth, and sixth—with more than a thousand students. Now reconfigured into fifth and sixth grades only, it has about 950 students in 32 classrooms. Approximately 83 percent of the students are Hispanic and receive free or reduced-price lunch.

When the fourth grade was still part of the school, the results of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) identified it as a low-performing school. Because of this rating, NWREL invited Chief Kamiakin to become one of its partner sites, receiving special technical assistance. The work, funded by the U. S. Department of Education, incorporates educational research on effective teaching and learning and draws upon established resources.

Right after signing the partnership agreement, Laboratory staff visited Chief Kamiakin to help staff determine how ready they were for school improvement. Having just lost the principal and vice principal, the school wasn't quite ready. "Not a lot of school improvement was going on," Rob Chambers, a sixth-grade teacher, confessed. Rather, they were adapting to the new situation.

By spring 2002, Chief Kamiakin's improvement process began to move. A School Improvement Team, made up of two fifth-grade teachers, two sixth-grade teachers, two paraeducators, a secretary, and the principal, had been working on goals. Then, a key event took place, shifting Chief Kamiakin's efforts into higher gear. The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) identified Harrison Middle School, which Chief Kamiakin students would attend eventually, as low performing. That designation brought some state help in school improvement processes that Chief Kamiakin could use to advance its own efforts. NWREL's work gave the school a running start.

In addition to administering, analyzing, and sharing the results of its readiness-for-reform survey, the Laboratory worked with school staff to help them learn what it means to become a high-performing learning community. Over the course of the partnership, NWREL provided training in student assessment; reviewing and organizing various forms of data; aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act; and coordinating ser-vices from a number of organizations.

During Chief Kamiakin's "rocky road," a number of lessons have been learned:

They needed more efficient ways to compile and report their data.
It's necessary to structure planned communication mechanisms.
There's only so much time in a day. To squeeze in weekly collaboration time, teachers agreed to share each other's classes.

This month, the school is in the middle of assessing student achievement in math. School staff will anxiously await the answer to the most critical question: Are they making a difference in student learning? That's the reason they're on this journey with student achievement as the destination.